The crackdown by law enforcement and university leaders on the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel encampments taking hold of college campuses across the country is raising a question: If not students, how many of these protesters are professionally trained to sow chaos?

One-half to one-third of the more than 280 protesters arrested at Columbia University and the City College of New York on Tuesday night were not students, sources in the New York Police Department tell the Sun. A nationally tally by the Associated Press released Thursday said more than 2,000 people have been arrested at campus protests since April 18.

“There are a number of different individuals who we know from over the years associated with protests, not just in our city, but in other cities as well who are linked to and who we see doing training around the change in tactics that we described yesterday and that we all witnessed,” the deputy commissioner of the counterterrorism bureau at the Police Department, Rebecca Weiner, said in remarks on Tuesday.

“The change in tactics,” Ms. Weiner said, includes “the black block attire, the breaking windows, breaking doors, the vandalism, property destruction, the barricading, makeshift weapons that we recovered in the encampment.”

Mayor Adams has confirmed that “outside agitators” have been operating on Columbia’s campus. He told an MSNBC reporter that the occupation of Hamilton Hall was “led” by individuals unaffiliated with the school, though he only pointed to “two particular individuals.”

“There were those who were never concerned about free speech. They were concerned about chaos. It was about external actors hijacking peaceful protests and influencing students to escalate,” Mr. Adams said during a Wednesday press conference. He said the city’s intelligence team is monitoring the individuals and organizations involved that are not students but declined to give names. 

Columbia is not the only campus that has been overtaken by volunteer or professional agitators who appear to be defying restrictions banning those unaffiliated with the universities from entering their premises. 

Out of the 79 people arrested for protesting at the University of Texas on Monday, 45 had no affiliation with the school, the school said. Out of the 19 protesters arrested by officers in riot gear at a pro-Palestinian rally at the University of Utah, 14 were not affiliated with the university. Four others are students and one is an employee. 

Similarly, several of the 30 students detained by police while protesting on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “are not students or affiliated with the university,” a spokesperson for the school said. After 13 people were arrested Monday for refusing to leave an encampment at Virginia Commonwealth University, Governor Youngkin said in a statement that “across the Commonwealth, we’ve seen student and significant non-student participants…”

One of the ten protesters arrested at the University of South Florida at Tampa on Tuesday is a 39-year-old who was found carrying a gun. Two others were charged with felonies. The Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society organized the demonstration, which attracted as many as 100 people.

At New York City, several pro-Palestinian protests have been co-organized by a Manhattan-based group, the People’s Forum, which calls itself “a movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” The group says it “nurtures the next generation of visionaries and organizers.”

That group hosted a “volunteer meeting” hours before people stormed and occupied a building on Columbia University’s campus, which has since been cleared. That’s according to the Washington Free Beacon, which attended the meeting via Zoom and observed “break out sessions” that focused on organizing new methods of “resistance.” The Beacon reports that it was not clear if the meeting attendees were Columbia students. The Forum did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment on the matter.

A review of public disclosure forms by the Free Press finds that an American-born tech entrepreneur, Neville Roy Singham, and his wife, Jodie Evans, donated more than $20.4 million to the People’s Forum between 2017 and 2022. A New York Times investigation in August reports that Mr. Singham, who lives at Shanghai, has close ties to at least four propaganda news sites that boost the Chinese Communist Party’s image abroad.